A Socio-pragmatic Study of Apology in Iraqi Non-standard Arabic

Abstract

Apology has been the focus of many studies in west and east. Some of these studies have focused on Arabic, but none of which have dealt with the use of apology in Iraqi non-standard Arabic. Besides, none has concentrated on the social value or gender  differences in the use of such a speech act in Arabic. This study is an attempt to outline the most commonly existent differences between Iraqi males and females in the use of apology strategies. The corpus consists of responses to Discourse Completion Test, which includes three different situations. The informants have been 30 subjects: 15 males and 15 females. The sample is randomly selected from different places in Najaf to be more representative. The survey is written in Arabic to elicit responses that approximate verbal apologies for each different situation.